Stitches
by lrviolet
Summary: "I hope one day you find someone who makes flowers grow even in the saddest parts of you." This was the last place they allowed themselves to touch in ways that could never border in platonic denotations. Post-War. Implied smut. [ShikaIno]


**Stitches**

 **Pairing:** Shikamaru/Ino, Sai/Ino, Shikamaru/Temari

 **Summary:** "I hope one day you find someone who makes flowers grow even in the saddest parts of you." This was the last place they allowed themselves to touch in ways that could never border in platonic denotations.

 **Notes:** This is me attempting to write something for the otp. After watching some Shippudden episodes, this suddenly came to mind. Some inspirations from the song Stitches (the acoustic one!) by Shawn Mendes which served as this fic's title. Reviews are loved and appreciated! Special thanks to my lovely beta for this, _Fire of Snow!_ :)

* * *

With sheets crinkled in between their arms, she stirred; the sun quietly nibbling the foot of the bed through the window. _His sheets_ , she was very sure now as her eyes, burdened and drained, survey the immediate surrounding. She was nestled close to him, her legs tangled with his, her hands pressed in between their warm bodies. Fully-clothed, she noted. She must have, at some point in the night, wanted to feel what was familiar, what had been bruised the same way she had been, what she believed belonged to her since the beginning.

Ino's head spun profusely as she tried to sit up, but his arm, extending across her torso, seemed to be pinning her back down. Then of course, Shikamaru had always been a light sleeper.

"Not yet," he said, and Ino was perfectly stilled.

The blueness of her eyes conveyed confusion. Out of habit, her hands reached for his face and traced each dent and each smooth muscle like braille, as though the answers were hidden skin deep, decoding the reason for finding them both, yet another night, within each other's arms as they awoke. No discarded clothes anywhere however, undergarments still intact. No different from the nights beforehand nonetheless, still smelling like two broken soldiers who wanted peace from a war not within their control.

He stared back, long and hard and cold, as if indicating that any physical movement Ino made from that point will cause him pain, more than the grief already suffocating them both the past few weeks (three weeks and four days to be exact, Shikamaru's not sure he liked to count, but it would be wrong if he didn't).

The momentary eye contact breaks, when her eyes fluttered as the sun glistened in her direction, light slipping through the cracks of his gray curtain. Lifting his arm, Shikamaru ran a few fingers across her hair, golden platinum, brighter but almost fading in the morning light.

When she posed the unspoken question in hesitation, he proceeded with stroking her cheek, shifting sideways to face her, answering, "No, we didn't. I would remember if we did."

"We have to stop," Ino mumbled.

 _Going nowhere or actually getting somewhere_ , Shikamaru couldn't determine himself what she meant. He merely frowned, like he always did when vagueness clouded his thoughts, as he greeted, "Good morning to you, too."

This was the last place they allowed themselves to touch in ways that could never border in platonic denotations.

-x-

Shikamaru and Ino knew each other even when they barely knew how to walk because their fathers wanted all three of them, including Chouji, to be acquainted, all three indispensable, destined to be lifelong partners in the future. _Teammates._

Such remained unsaid for most part, inherent even to the point that they could feel each other's emotions thoroughly with any verbal or physical contact: the sadness, the joy, the guilt and the pride burning in their eyes and emanating from their persons.

So after the Fourth Great Shinobi War funeral, when Ino refused to come out of her room after two weeks straight, the two boys couldn't let it pass.

For the next three days, Chouji climbed up to her window and waited for her to respond every time. She usually sat on her bed, holding both of her legs together, rested, and looking at the pink carnation at the edge of her bed pensively. Upon seeing him, she would invite him in and offer tea, to which he would always decline. Instead, he would try to convince her to have barbeque with the rest of their friends, to ease her, for _'some fresh air or something'_ , and each time she politely refused. On the third day, Chouji gets turned down completely, and Ino merely faked a grin to fool him so she wouldn't have to explain herself when she asked him to leave.

Narrating this to his friend after that last straw, Chouji, hopeless and defeated, dropped next to Shikamaru on top of the hill as they continued to watch the clouds morph in shapeless forms with such tender ease.

"She was just… sitting there. Not even crying," Chouji remarked. "I would understand if she didn't want to come out of the house because she's gotten her eyes swollen from grieving. But she wasn't. She looked like her usual self, talked normal. And that's not normal at all, Shikamaru. Do you think she'd be fine?"

The lanky shinobi sat up and lit another cigarette, a habit obtained from a beloved legend. His eyes were weighed down by creases and folds, as if telling Chouji, who grimaced when his friend exhaled smoke through his nose, that he didn't give a fuck these days if smoking really had the power to kill him. A greater damage had struck far too many times to let one stick officially ignite his demise.

"She's Ino," Shikamaru answered. "She's always been fine."

Chouji knew of course, that Shikamaru was very much convinced she wasn't.

-x-

With the enemy defeated, the infinite tsukuyomi reversed, and nothing but the Allied Forces shouting and cheering with whatever was left of their bodies and comrades, and every reason to celebrate their survival evident in their marked wide smiles and long embraces – Shikamaru collapsed to his knees, his chakra running at an all-time low. He could pass out at any minute, but for some reason he didn't.

Later, that reason was sitting right beside him – a monotonous muted hum of green light released from her two hands just atop his bruised chest. Her own chakra, with whatever's left he supposed, started flowing into his veins. He managed to smile. Her medical ninjutsu fell short of a mile to Sakura's, but that wasn't worth fussing about.

"No, you don't have –"

"I'm doing what I need to do," she retorted. "Besides you need to walk. I can't carry your heavy ass behind my back on my own. Chouji's got his hands full already." Her tired eyes curved upward and she offered a smile. Shikamaru couldn't remember anything after that when he woke up at the hospital two days later.

It wasn't that they didn't want to go home; it was the fact that their fathers wouldn't be there to applaud their victory, rejoice the end of an era and build a new one, even when that deemed triumph had waged their own lives.

-x-

After seeing Chouji that day and realizing that two weeks of moping wasn't truly something Yamanaka Ino would do, Shikamaru decided he would have to rid her of the emotional stress by talking it out. When he dropped by at her place that afternoon however, the main door was locked, and her bedroom window was veiled in purple drapes. His hunches directed him to the mass shinobi graveyard.

A bouquet of carnations, red and white but mostly pink, was on top of Yamanaka Inoichi's stone. His daughter kneeled before it and lit a candle.

The shadows followed him, like they always did, stretching further and further when the sun began to set as he neared his female teammate.

"Red stands for admiration, white for innocence, and pink for remembrance," Ino stated, his shadow casting his silhouette against the stone.

She allowed his hand to settle on her shoulder, squatting now beside her with a heavier heart. He cleared his throat. "When Asuma-sensei passed away, my father and I played shogi. It was the first time someone decided to come up to me and tell me I need to move on."

Painfully watching her smile at the memory of their teacher, Shikamaru fell silent and waited. And waited. Until she opened her mouth again to say: "I know. I'm trying."

He clicked his tongue in disagreement. "No, Ino. You're not. You're denying yourself that by acting like it doesn't hurt."

"And here I thought the one person who'll actually understand me is you considering you lost him out there too," Ino quietly countered. He saw himself in her eyes, but found it difficult to associate it with vengeance or atonement. She was a dead soul trapped in a body who wanted to find the promised peace.

Shikamaru hated it, but he also wouldn't want to give up the future he vowed to protect which willed him to get up every morning, no matter how troublesome. "Look, if you're just going to sulk around and keep other people out, that's not any better than getting killed or dying in the battlefield. I can't lose you this way, Ino."

When her eyes met his as if trying to construe the statement, he gazed at his father's grave sitting just beside Inoichi's.

His resolve betrayed him as soon as he read Shikaku's name across the stone, and with it, Ino cracked. Eventually he stretched open his arm and she leaned in his embrace, affectionately tighter than before. Nothing but comfort melted away the anxiety, the sole morbid depression, the entire trauma. He smelled like burnt cigarettes.

Her shrieks filled his ears, his chest suddenly damp, and she quivered until twilight blanketed them across the field.

He stroked her hair, gently, telling her to let it all out, the rage and the loss. When Ino calmed, it was already dark with the moon crowning on them as their only prime light. That and the candle that remained lit before Inoichi.

"I just can't lose you too."

-x-

Eagerly his hand toyed with the small rip on the side of her shirt, going lower and lower, while lips tended to the strangled moans coming from her, furiously wanting that they do this quick and for most part, private. Perhaps it had been just four days ago when Chouji revealed his despair over Ino's stubbornness, and perhaps Shikamaru hadn't quite calculated how years of undebated sexual tension would lead him and Ino cuddling each other in his bed for the past four nights.

Waking up into each other's arms without a reason would be beyond expectation, but no one protested that she stayed over, not even his mother who even doted on the blonde like her own daughter (of course, whether Yoshino actually knew what went about in Shikamaru's room, the boy doubted, but felt no need to ask).

Tonight, however, seemed different. Not when Ino asked him this morning that they stop this – like it would somehow stop her from being sprawled asleep and snoring on the entire bed when he got home from his duties.

As he helped Ino slip out of her top and he himself undress, with her needy consent, he allowed his body to take control. Shikamaru knew what the risks were, that quenching his lust for a girl he'd known his entire fucking life would only mean nothing but trouble. And he'd been through worse than hell. If Inoichi was alive, Shikamaru would be tortured to death for having the guts to spill his remorse on this curtained sin.

But he had gotten terribly lonely, and Ino was the golden ticket out of that miserable absolute end. She too needed someone, to hold through every nightmare, which he now witnessed to be truly terrible: how she couldn't stop crying that her breathing became shallow, how her shivering body shuddered when she was half-asleep, how she often rushed to the toilet to vomit.

Unresisting the coming of age dilemmas, they eventually would have gotten to this reckless point in their lives anyway, in such a wrong that there wouldn't be a solution –with an IQ over 200 or not – but to simply give in.

Shikamaru was not immune to the deity that she was, but it wasn't like he had ever let it cloud his thinking.

So this was them: he picked her up when she needed someone to save her, but she was still Yamanaka Ino. Still broken, still arranged flowers with every graceful amicable touch. Beautiful even in every mistake. And him. Who was reminded that all shadows required light to be made, that he'll be awkward and afraid and flustered, while falling off his high horse because he was too calculating and too dull to even hold on to something that could've been the Band-Aid that patched up their devastated hearts.

 _"I hope one day you find someone who makes flowers grow even in the saddest parts of you."_

A man like him often thought about the difference between fucking and making love, but he guessed that, as Ino laid in his arms, falling asleep to his breathing, they hadn't done either. Pretty sure that he couldn't, and she wouldn't – they allowed themselves to touch, kiss, find the hidden scars with childhood memories attached to them, and they talked till the morning until the Hokage wanted him at the office and Sakura required her assistance at the clinic.

They wouldn't call it fucking, like kunoichi missions of sleeping with an alien just to acquire information or randomly waiting at a corner of a brothel house for someone who'll pay for similar services, no strings attached. That wasn't _it_ , because strings had long been involved, countless emotions that mandated a certain restraint. Making love was yet on another end of the spectrum, an extreme reserved cautiously for people who were _actually in love_ , and to the best of both their knowledge they weren't that to each other at all.

Ino got better unsurprisingly, like she always did, and the sleeping over stopped after a month. She found her old rhythm, Shikamaru noticed, as she treated both her teammates for some barbeque and reopened the flower shop the day before Kakashi's inauguration.

Contrary to what he feared, Shikamaru's relationship with Ino remained quite cordial.

Everything just became a little fucked up after that, to say the least.

-x-

Five months later, he had to leave for Sunagakure to formulate and amend the recognized treaties between the two villages. A reason to protect and forge an even better allied nation. Something that the Hokage himself could do but demanded Shikamaru's well-versed mind to accompany him in sealing the deal since his intuitions were often impeccable.

When he came back, caught having lunch with the eldest of the sand siblings by some of their friends, Shikamaru tried to gather Ino and Chouji together at Yakini-Q for dinner. The other wouldn't decline such a humble offer – they were after all, practically raised in this little eater ever since Asuma introduced it.

Before the order came out, Naruto and Sai arrived and squeezed themselves to share a table with them, splitting the tab nonetheless because Shikamaru _'couldn't take any more freeloaders when they obviously earned more.'_

The hero of the last war found his way next to Chouji, while Sai ended up in between Shikamaru and Ino. After a few minutes, the newcomer and Ino looked entirely comfortable, exchanging whispers and sneakily imitating each other's dining etiquette. Shikamaru continued to observe, quietly eating more meat than he could. His mind dwelled further: this was Sai – every social growth would have to be stemmed from people who by nature, knew how to be socially adept.

What caught Shikamaru's attention was how paper boy pieced together a serving that appeared to be so familiar. Since when did Sai even know how Ino liked her grilled meat? (Paired with chopped white onions and two dips at kimchi sauce!) When she blushed at a certain joke, (that wasn't even _that funny_ , Shikamaru figured) her eyes travelled from Sai the speaker to Naruto who never got the gist. It felt like he had grown distant in a span of, what, three months away from her. Her stubbornness to face grief from a loved one's death before was now compensated heavily by engaging with this two, especially with the one in between them, who he felt had been more than a friend to her, but less than what Shikamaru was in her life.

As the night deepened, Ino voiced her need to be home, a mild headache already demanding early bedtime.

"I'll walk you home," Shikamaru presented at once, throwing his napkin on top of the table visibly, and Chouji's eyes wandered from his targeted pork slice to his best friend, chopsticks suspended in the air. Something was up.

"My, my," Ino pretended to gasp, crossing her arms. "Chivalry isn't dead after all."

He missed that about her, her loud unnecessary remarks that meant she was in a good mood. "You're one to talk."

At the door, just barely out of earshot, Sai started scribbling in his notebook and saying aloud, _"Walk girl home and she'll sound very impressed."_

They stayed silent mostly after they left the restaurant; shuffling feet creating friction on asphalt, and sometimes dogs barking or frogs croaking became the background music to what might as well be an overly romantic walk.

"I kissed her. Twice. And then one thing led to another."

Ino didn't ask, but his words were already spilling out of his mouth mindlessly. Like everything he did, needed to be justified. Or maybe he was just explaining why the girl from Suna was seen around with him, even more comfortable out of the political assignments they'd been given.

(Shikamaru would grow into a very important man one day and Ino knew of course that an equally important woman was to match him –maybe the Chuunin exams from so many years back predicted that much.)

She bobbed her head as a response. Then, a smile. Then a giggle with a glint in her eyes that contested the stars just above them. Funny how her emotions, for a woman so sensitive with these things, paced frame after frame, just one after another, surfacing as independent actions, like she was unsure truly how to react so she decided to take it slow to conceal the truth. But he knew better.

(She knew how he felt, too. Unexplained guilt ran across his face even in this darkness.)

"Our little Shikamaru-kun," she cooed and he blushed. "Going out and hitting on real tough ladies, all right. Yoshino would love to hear this when I see her."

"Keep my mother out of this. She's not particularly my favorite person to talk to when it comes to girls."

Ino scoffed, shaking her head. "Please. She'll love Temari-san."

"Mom loves you more, though," he opposed. More feet shuffling, his hands down his pockets. "Kinda like a favorite, really."

He couldn't dare himself to stop right now and look at Ino or else they would end up making out in the middle of the street where people would see and he just couldn't afford it. Their fathers must be looking down on them right now and wondered where did they ever go wrong in raising them. That or Inoichi would be sending his fits via mental images or nightmares just to prove his point.

"Look, Shikamaru, I get it, okay." They are already at her doorstep when she spoke again, already head craning a little to meet his eyes (since when did he grow this tall? She could still point out the time she had been taller than him).

"I never said you didn't," he drawled out, avoiding her gaze. Arguments with Ino always turned crazy when you disagreed.

"Plus, I'm fully aware you've been crushing over her for ages now," Ino winked, holding out her hand as if to call it even. He still appeared completely red in the face. "I'm pretty proud of you for getting it this far."

He sighed, unable to excuse himself or rebut her allegations but seemed appropriate to take her hand and shake on it anyway. Ino worked that way, wanting things to be made easy and simple, slide out of the problem when she could. He appreciated it if she actually tried resolving it as much as he had been doing. The enigma of love. Or some sort derived from it anyway.

Thinking about it pressed some disturbing buttons now look where it led them.

"No hard feelings?" He asked.

Her smile disappeared, the playful aura vanished and his inside churned at the thought that maybe he said something out of place. Then she grinned with much assurance, holding her thumb out. "My feelings were never even that hard."

-x-

Sometime later, he spotted Sai at the Yamanaka Flower Shop as he dropped by to pick up the bouquet his mother ordered. Shikamaru entered, eyebrows raised in surprise to see Sai wearing the yellow apron he often saw from Ino.

"Sai?"

He greeted Shikamaru a good morning. "I hear you're going to pick up white roses and hyacinths, correct?" Bending down to pick up a beautifully arranged set from below with a card that acknowledged its owner, Sai placed it on the counter and grinned. "That will be 700 ryo."

"Eh? We always get a discount." Confused more than ever, Shikamaru reached for his wallet and counted his bills. "I'm 200 short."

"What discount? Ino didn't tell me about a discount," Sai wondered.

"Of course she wouldn't," Shikamaru sighed, scratching the back of his head with a small smile, before handing Sai his total payment after emptying all of his pockets.

"Thank you, sir! Do come again!"

Before Shikamaru left, he allowed himself the leeway to inquire why. If Ino wouldn't bother telling him anything, might as well deduce something out of this. "Where's Ino, by the way?"

"She's on duty at the clinic today with Sakura," Sai answered dully.

Shikamaru smirked. That Yamanaka, really. "So you're here doing her bidding? Sai, really, Ino's great and all but, you gotta be a man about these things. When she forces you to babysit the shop, always say no, alright?"

"Oh, you're taking it the wrong way," he told Shikamaru, his tone shifting into a pensive note. The mood also seemed lighthearted, giving him some color around his pallid cheeks. "I actually came to offer her some help. If you haven't noticed, she's been juggling tasks. I decided to work here while she's away and while I'm _not_ away. After, of course reading this book about flowers and their meanings and basic arrangements florists did from all over the world. It's quite an enjoyable activity."

Shikamaru hated flowers. Well, not all of them, but they made his nose itch.

Guess Ino found someone who'd make her bloom far better than he ever was at it, Shikamaru thought. He didn't know why exactly, from his untouched dinner, unbuttoned flak jacket, and sleepless disposition, it would get him this upset as to finish an entire pack of cigarettes.

-x-

Funny how fate enjoyed mocking him when he was assigned to a covert operations turned ambush, with Sai, Ino and Sakura to overthrow missing-nins from the Hidden Cloud Village. Said rogue ninjas ran around the Fire Country, all rumored to be collecting forbidden jutsus from one village to another and gathered at a hideout close to Konoha's territorial borders.

One of the forbidden techniques being kept was a speedy collection of a jinchuriki's chakra without extracting the beasts from their very hosts. This proves to be very more efficient, when back in the days, the Akatsuki still searched and tracked jinchurikis to capture the hosts themselves in order to acquire the tailed beasts. This technique involves sensory perception and at the same time transmission – something the Yamanakas techniques are very akin to, thus the reason for Ino's inclusion.

A plan had already been put to motion as they soared the high skies using Sai's drawings. Sakura had been in charge of planting the bomb deep within the temple's core as part of the ambush plan, but before she could escape, the ground shook and the ceiling dangerously crumbled slowly, leaving her trapped.

Apparently, feeling like she could modify the strategy, Ino pulled a stunt while in mid-air, daring to transfer her soul on the enemy, a masked man who used a variety of puppet strings, before he could target his arrow at Sai and Shikamaru. She managed to slip and take control of the body. At the very same time she tossed one of the puppeteer's string towards Shikamaru who hovered closer to the enemy to enforce his Shadow Stitching, finally understanding that this was Ino. She tied the other end embodied with chakra to the arrow, and aimed for then the sinking temple, the very hideout of the enemy, now being slowly sucked into the ground. Sakura was still in there.

Meanwhile, the pink-haired girl reached the highest tower just in time, the window being the only opening left as an exit. As Sakura attempted to escape, her feet were already held firmly back. She tried breaking the sand into crumbles but this served not much help as it climbed on her much tighter afterwards.

Abruptly, an arrow entered the window, granting Sakura some hope that it was the team outside. Upon closer inspection of the arrow, she recognized Ino's chakra and untied the string from the arrow and hastily attached it to her waist. Eliminating the quicksand on her feet to release her, Sakura tugged the line, indicating that the others need to get her out now. Reading on such message, Shikamaru pulled from the other end, quickly rescuing the other member of his team.

When Sakura was outside and being reeled up, her eyes fell on an enemy far below who aimed a flamed arrow at one of Sai's drawings. The flying paper bird that was carrying Ino's unconscious body was then set on fire, to everyone else's horror.

"Ino!"

Ino's unconscious body nevertheless slipped from her already burned well-drawn flying beast, so fast that Shikamaru didn't know what to do next. This was out of his calculations, plainly one of her dumb ideas again. _When will you ever learn that you can't use that technique without me pinning the enemy down or guarding your body, you reckless idiot._

Losing his wits to chase after her, someone more trained and efficient at flying, the person who summoned such beasts flew low enough to catch her in his arms like the prince she'd been dying to meet after Sasuke defected. Shikamaru watched as she released her Mind Transfer and opened her eyes to see none other Sai's face growing brighter at the sight of her awake. Her hand brushed his cheek and crashed her lips against the man, shocked at first with his eyes widening at the act, but returned the favor. An otherwise beautiful ending but it fostered storms inside Shikamaru he had no way of telling why it should.

When they landed, he pulled Ino to his side, deliberately hurting her wrist as he did so. The kunoichi struggled and threw profanities at him with Sakura tailing behind.

"Why did you alter the original plan? Huh?" he shouted, something Shikamaru strangely never did but they all had moments. "I was ready to use the Shadow Stitching. I could have killed you inside the enemy's body!"

"Is the means so important? They're dead. We prevented them from obtaining tailed beasts' chakras. The goal is to finish, and we did."

Shikamaru's expression looked pained, infuriated. "The plan was set out and made simple for your little head to comprehend and comply with, but you risked your life for that one chance when you _could've missed_ , and let me tell you it has happened countless of times, and when your body was falling off a burning vessel. Do you think this was the perfect time to have an Ino Moment just to be the hero of this mission?"

Sakura tried to get in between them. "Guys, come on –"

Sai hastily pulled her back in case the altercation heated even more, plainly lowering his head as the two teammates continued.

"Oh, so that's it, then? That I stole your thunder, that you could go back home being glorified for your brilliant strategy. Nara Shikamaru, the wisest of them all, the greatest mind ever to be born in this era, apparently ignoring the fact that we exist," Ino sneered, equally raising her voice. "That if the Sixth Hokage even thought of that, he wouldn't send the rest of us here, with you, if he knew all along this might as well be done solo. Oh that's right, because it can't be!"

"That's not the point," Shikamaru retorted, defensively swings away his right arm. He wasn't even sure what he was angry about anymore. "If you had missed, if you didn't get in, if you allowed yourself to disappear for a few minutes, without us ever realizing that your body was facing its death from falling off at an altitude of fifty-seven feet, do you think I would want to even face the village when I can't protect the people with me here? Do you think I would go back without you?"

"Well, the point is I _didn't_ miss," Ino defended vehemently. "How could you not trust me with my techniques? I've trained so hard for the Mind Transfer to be done not only through a straight line hit, but also through chakra sensory, the same way transmission is done."

"Why am I not surprised," Shikamaru cocked his head, dismissive and mocking still. "We could've used that technique earlier, if you had only revealed how much you've improved and made it more flexible. Then again, you never tell me what's been going on with you lately anyway so why bother." His glare moved from Ino to the other man in this squad and he scoffed, hands down his pockets and started walking away, ears still red from losing his temper.

"Go to fucking Suna and get fucking laid, you bastard, so we can all be at peace!" She cried at him, storming out at another direction.

"That's enough, Ino!" Sakura demanded, taking her arm as they hurriedly try to exit the intense confrontation.

His hand already reached the lighter, and a stick had been posed in between his lips. "Don't worry, I'll make sure to write a news report about how I got fucking laid. Meanwhile, you can hide every little dirty secret you can like a twelve-year-old and make sure not one of us gets a juice of it until it becomes too obvious to deny."

-x-

Shikamaru left for Suna often, most of the time failing to report to Konoha when the Hokage requested for his presence.

Ino stayed, declined missions that involve a chance of them crossing paths, and taught Sai the language of flowers and how it was similar to the language of people and faces and their true hearts.

They ignored each other for months and Chouji missed eating with the whole team at Yakiniku-Q. Sure, Karui never left his side since the war ended, but nothing hurt him more than having to separately spend his days with the two friends he grew up with. They couldn't even say hello to each other in the streets and although the story about why this was the case vaguely reached his ears, he just didn't expect that they'd let their stubbornness get in the way.

(But it was so much more than that, Chouji knew.)

-x-

She compelled herself to believe that she didn't need him. She had grown accustomed to his absence, that ignoring him for six months since that mission was easier than she expected.

However, while Ino browsed through an old photo album kept up in the attic in search for her father's picture to put up at the Ino-Shika-Cho memorial, she saw nothing but photographs of her favorite trio and it made her smile. One was her and Shikamaru in the Nara forests, a deer bending down to lick Ino's cheek. Another had been of her asleep on Shikamaru's back – they were around seven or eight then, with Chouji also lifting her a bit to ease the heavy weight. And sometimes these things, these little details set her off.

She knew that every breath he took from those unlit sticks, every story he never told, every waking day he held her hand and watched her back on endless occasions, to her calloused hands bearing roses' thorns, her father's legacy passed down, her own valley of mistakes and faults, that there is one thing she loved more than the stars.

And it was him.

-x-

It was of course expected that they would see each other in the memorial. It had been a year since the war ended, and tradition required the members of the three clans to gather in honor of such heroes.

Jabbing his ribs as a greeting when they were both seated next to each other, Ino smiled at him and his dazed condition. He nudged her arm back, wondering what this was about this time, but she only mouthed, "I'm sorry."

He looked shocked, but all along knew anyway that she would be the first to fix things. She always knew how when it came to him.

"I'm sorry, too."

"Me and Sai have been going steady for about a year now."

He nodded. "I realized that."

"Listen," Ino began, carrying with her a bouquet of carnations yet again, paired with lavender fields. "Drop by the flower shop later. I've got something to give you."

They offered prayers and similarly thanked both their fathers.

-x-

When he reached the flower shop, she already came out rushing, bringing with her a beautiful set of yellow and whitish pink cosmos, and, he assumed, some freshly cut bronze Gazania hybrids. She then dragged him with her at full speed out, and he supposed he needed to ask but with Ino dashing towards Ichiraku's he doubted she would even hear it.

When they arrive, a familiar girl with darker blonde pigtails sat and played with her ramen bowl, fairly deep in thought, and Sai, out of the corner of Shikamaru's eyes, was at the other end, signaling at Ino to make the move now.

She dropped the flowers into Shikamaru's hands; his entire face flushing a hot red, then pushed him inside, bumping Temari from behind, who choked on the soup, hastily grabbing a glass of water and turning round to see who dared to disturb her peaceful afternoon.

Trembling in fear, Shikamaru gulped and bit his lip. "Uh, hey."

She tilted her head at the bouquet in his hands, almost entirely turning red in the cheeks too. "Hey, you."

"I'm not sure… how… sorry about that, well, it's just that - " Shikamaru stammered. While she was out of the picture and unseen to Temari, Ino's hand automatically hides her face, shaking her head. Damn, she couldn't be expecting he could pull off this shit, could she?

"Those are cosmos. They mean peace and tranquility," Sai spoke from behind, like a passerby who happened to just finish his meal. "They can grow in extremely warm areas. This little thing here is a Gazania, also good in hot weather conditions. With a little wind. No wet soil, they hate that."

"Thank… you, Sai?" Shikamaru, beat red, had suddenly pieced everything in place and realized this was the plan after all. Sai just grinned and patted his back when Temari chuckled and took the flowers from the former's hands.

"So I assume you want me to grow a garden back home?" she said in an excited condescending tone, watching the flowers in delight. "Not bad, Nara. They do look kinda nice. I might reconsider."

Shikamaru hummed a small thanks, relieved. He knew of course that Temari was not involved in the lovebirds' plot, incidentally just having a meal at the ramen stop. He wanted to scold the two for setting it up, but he found them, still at earshot, already lost in each other's stories: Ino animatedly discussing something about taking a swim in a nearby river, which Sai fondly agrees as an excellent idea.

For a long time, Temari's gentle smile reminded him of what his father told him before about women and their soft sides. She had loads of them really, but that didn't make her less of the strong person he definitely admired and stuck with. Ino's intuition about romance never ceased to amaze him, as he and Temari started sightseeing Konoha again, for no reason at all this time, just to spend her remaining days here until she went home.

And perhaps that was love– that they might not be in each other's arms, because it didn't quite matter if they were, because that kind of love never demanded or hoped or was selfish to take away the person they were truly meant to be with and the person who deserved to watch them bloom in all their sad parts. Perhaps love was supposed to be this way, at least for them, who knew that they would still grow old with each other, still patiently watching their back in times of trouble and need.

Contented at the answer he came up with for the hardest question and longest unsettled one in his head, Shikamaru slipped his hand to hold Temari's and managed to smile.

Love was a mysterious thing, but nonetheless, beautiful.


End file.
